Letting Nature Help Clean Contaminated Groundwater

Sometimes the best way to clean up our messes is to let Nature help. A good example is the successful cleanup of trichloroethylene (TCE), one of the nation's most prevalent pollutants of groundwater. TCE is present at more than half of all Superfund sites.

One such site is at Edwards Air Force Base in California, used from 1958 to 1967 to clean X-15 rocket engines. At this site, a team of researchers at the Western Region HSRC has successfully demonstrated that TCE pollution can be eliminated safely, economically, and quickly by means of in-situ (in place) bioremediation.

Before 1991, the only technologies available for cleaning up contaminated groundwater were not only costly and inefficient, but could actually set back cleanup significantly. The HSRC researchers suspected that natural processes could do a better job of cleaning up chlorinated solvents such as TCE. The technology they proposed, in-situ bioremediation, uses naturally occurring microbes that break down and consume the hazardous materials as food, transforming them into materials that are not hazardous.

For further information, contact:
Dr. Perry McCarty
Professor Emeritus
Department of Civil Engineering
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4020
Telephone: (415) 723-4131
E-mail: mccarty@cive.stanford.edu